Kung Fu Rebels (1980) Review

Rating: 2 out of 5

Director: Ching-Chen Yang

Year: 1980

Plot:

The plot of “Kung Fu Rebels” is simple, and yet it’s a full movie that surrounds it. Four masters of kung fu are on a path to fight one another, but only two of them are good. There are two evil masters and they want to be the only ones alive to showcase their kung fu. That being said, they decide to hire and train the ultimate assassin to do their dirty work. Their quest is to murder the good ones, and be the only ones left standing with their mastery of kung fu.

Thoughts:

As with all the movies that I review, I first look at the transfer to see if it’s any good. In the case of “Kung Fu Rebels” the DVD is just a VHS transfer as far as I can tell, and it is not updated in anyway. It has good dubbing, but the rest is not that grand. Don’t expect high definition quality on this one, as it is not there.

Aside from the transfer, the story is very simple, and stretched out quite a bit. There are four central characters to this movie, and they are either good or bad. Then there’s a fifth character that is an outlier that is set to attack the protagonists. The kung fu action starts early on in the film, but it is not straight forward, it has a bit of comedy to it. The comedy makes the movie a bit fun to watch, but you don’t get a lot of serious brawls early on. They are fast, and use comedy to move them along. In fact, some of them are down right silly, and played for pure laughs.

Because of the transfer, the fighting is sometimes too close to be enjoyable, at least in some of the early on fights. There’s a ramp up in quality towards the third act and final fights, which is standard for kung fu movies of the era. I appreciated the final ones, and definitely thought it had some weight to it. However, I didn’t think the story merited such a long winded telling. I found myself a little bored with the story, and while there were some decent subplots to kind of carry the overall burden, the comedy and fighting, and random moments just didn’t add up for me. Yes, it has some good kung fu, but getting to it and enjoying it just left me wanting. I give “Kung Fu Rebels” a rating of 2 out of 5.

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